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19 May 2016. The General Assembly of ESPI met in ordinary session on 26 April 2016. At the meeting the General Assembly elected Mr. Jean-Jacques Tortora as the new Director, taking office on 1 June 2016. Mr. Tortora is an aerospace engineer by training, has broad experience in the space domain and has been the Secretary General of Eurospace for the past nine years.

18 May 2016. The world is advancing more rapidly than ever and all the technological development makes it highly unpredictable. In a dynamic situation like this, we still need some consistency and security. A legal order consisting of hard law norms provides this type of desired stabile governance, especially in areas dominated by technology, such as space law.

16 May 2016. On April 19 ESPI held a workshop on the policy stakes of European space-based infrastructures, looking specifically at Galileo, the European positioning, navigation and timing system that is being deployed. Under Chatham House rules the different stakeholders involved in this European programme had the opportunity to exchange views about how the programme was moving along and the challenges to meet throughout the value chain, from the manufacturer to the end user.

22 April 2016. This Perspective looks at the most recent developments behind the two major initiatives to prevent conflict in Outer Space in order to answer the question whether the international community is going to adopt either of them in the near future.

14 April 2016. On 13th of April ESPI organized an evening event on one of the currently hottest topics in space law – "Space Mining between the Space Treaties and the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act". The subject was discussed by four experts: Dr. Philip De Man (Leuven University), Prof. Tanja Masson-Zwaan (President of IISL), Prof. Gbenga Oduntan (Kent Law School), Robert D. Richards (CEO, Moon Express), representing a variety of views.

12 April 2016. A new blog post has been published, ‘Space, Heart and Geopolitics’. The blog post addresses how space should be leveraged to a much larger extent in order to assist the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in developing countries. You can find the post here.

06 April 2016. On 5 April, ESPI received a visit of a group of law students from the University of Graz. In the framework of their professional visit to Vienna and the UN in connection with the session of the UNCOPUOS Legal Subcommittee, the students visited ESPI and received a brief presentation of the Institute activities by the ESPI Director, Peter Hulsroj.

29 March 2016. A new post is now available on ESPI's blog, 'Civil Society'. As the title suggests the blog post addresses the relationship between the space community and civil society , and what can be done to further optimise the dialogue.The blog post can be found here.

25 March 2016. On 7 March the ESPI Director, Peter Hulsroj, participated in a roundtable organised by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) on the topic “Supporting Implementation of the 2030 Agenda Through Knowledge, Data and Information”. The issue was how international actors involved with Earth Observation can support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN.

18 March 2016. By any measure, access to space has been a true success story for Europe. For more than three decades, Europe has enjoyed the availability of an independent, reliable and efficient infrastructure and means for launching into space.

17 March 2016. In an interview with the Italian magazine Fly Orbit News, ESPI Resident Fellow Matteo Tugnoli discussed the topic of rocket reusability, one of the most anticipated technological breakthrough in access to space.

26 February 2016. On 24 February ESPI organized a Senior Voices event featuring Ambassador Dr. Peter Jankowitsch, former long serving Chairman of the UNCOPUOS, and Dr. David Kendall, the incoming Chairman. The event was arranged in cooperation with the Foreign Policy and United Nations Association of Austria and took place at lunch time at the Association’s premises in the Stallburg, part of the Hofburg.

23 February 2016. In its 19 February issue, Air & Cosmos , the well know French weekly on air and space, devotes a part to the completeness of the last GPS block programme (GPS-IIF) and the preparation of the coming GPS III. The article summarizes in a concise manner the current status of the different GNSS constellations. Serge Plattard is interviewed on the recent developments of Galileo and the importance of the GPS/Galileo compatibility and interoperability.

9 February 2016. The eight volume of the “Yearbook on Space Policy” series edited by ESPI and published by SpringerWienNewYork is now available. This edition covers global space related developments in the calendar year 2014.